


Remedial Cartography

by disco_vendetta (brinn)



Category: The Host - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-11
Updated: 2012-09-11
Packaged: 2017-11-14 00:30:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/509401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brinn/pseuds/disco_vendetta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I miss you."<br/>"I'm right here."<br/>"No. You're way over there." And she reaches out and tucks a strand of crazy blonde hair behind one ear, their fingers still intertwined so both their knuckles rest against Wanderer’s new cheek.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Remedial Cartography

_i like my body when it is with your  
body. It is so quite new a thing._  
\- e.e. cummings  
  
  
  
  
1.  
  
"Yo. Munchkin. Out."  
  
Jamie looks at her balefully from where he's sprawled out on his side of their pushed-together mattresses, the picture of despondent teenage injustice.  
  
"Do I hafta?" His voice is muffled by all the pillows he's stolen and turned into a Jamie-nest. Jared stretches lazily on the other mattress and gives Mel one of those sleepy-eyed smiles that make her a lunatic, ruffles his hand through Jamie's hair.  
  
"Yes. You hafta."  
  
"For sex stuff?"  
  
"Yes. For sex stuff," she agrees solemnly. "Now scram."  
  
Jamie makes some truly extravagant gagging noises before rolling onto his feet.  
  
"I guess I'll just go sleep in the hallway, then," he sighs dramatically, and she catches him up in her arms and she waits for Wanderer's hum of delight a moment too long and Jamie must see (because he's Jamie and he sees everything because he's a beautiful little mutant), because he ducks his head down so they can both pretend he's still small enough to fit under her chin and lets her kiss the top of his forehead, like he's been far too grown-up and dignified to let them do lately -  
  
 _Her._ The remembering is worse than the absence, sometimes. It's just her now.  
  
"Go crash with Ian," she orders him, hip-checking him out towards the makeshift door. "Keep Wanda company with him, okay?" And Jamie makes another one of his freaky-intuitive faces and then quirks his eyebrows at her.  
  
"You're in a bad mood," he suggests, even though it's not really a question. She makes a face at him right back and doesn't say anything.  
  
"Ian won't share?"  
  
"He's had her all week!" She blurts out, still fuming and righteously indignant.  
  
"They're, like, soul-dating," Jamie says with all the solemnity of teenager he's finally letting himself be now.  
  
"Yes," she agrees grudgingly.  
  
"And she's in a little alien jar thing."  
  
"She is at that."  
  
"So they can't have sex stuff."  
  
She squints at him.  
  
"Presumably," she finally says at the same time Jared mutters _hopefully_ and shoots her this shit-eating grin that makes her want to punch him and then kiss it better. She glares at him.  
  
"So…maybe he sort of gets….dibs? For now?"  
  
" _Out_ ," she growls and shoves two pillows at him, dragging the door back in place behind him as he swaggers down the hallway, his shadow impossibly tall behind him.  
  
  
  
  
"Jare, I need to borrow your knife."  
  
Jared laughs into the hollow of her collar bone and she shivers with Wanda's memory of this, of _this_ , of how they dragged her back, together, kicking and screaming the whole way as Wanda's nails had ghosted across his skin.  
  
"Baby, you say the sweetest things." And then, a while later, "Are you gonna stab someone with it?"  
  
"Maybe," she whispers, her breath hitching. "I haven't decided yet."  
  
  
  
  
Kyle sleeps like the dead, like his brother, which Sunny mentioned in passing despite the fact that technically she's sharing a room with Lily now. He just lays there on his back, not face-down with his limbs in six different directions, which makes him look less like Ian, which makes it easier.  
  
For all his hair-trigger instinct when he's awake, he doesn't even stir until she's got a knee on either side of his ribcage and Jared's knife pressed flush against his neck.  
  
"Hi, Kyle." She smiles, sunny as anything.  
  
"…Hi," he finally says softly, trying to keep his throat from moving too much.  
  
"Kyle, I have this problem." She keeps her tone conversational, friendly-like. "And that problem is that I remember what your face looked like when you held Wanda and me down and tried to _drown_ us. And it just makes me so _angry_ sometimes, Kyle. I've nearly died a couple times now, and it just puts me in a _really_ bad mood."  
  
Kyle is barely breathing, but his face is calm. Peaceful, even.  
  
"Wanderer was afraid of you," Melanie drawls, almost bored. "But she didn't wanna hurt you. She tried to let me do that for her, but we couldn't quite manage it. I mean, I can't say why for sure, but you wanna know my theory?"  
  
Kyle doesn't say anything, just stares at her with his brother's eyes.  
  
" _I_ think that she couldn't quite stand to let me save us, because she knew what I would do to you. You see, Wanderer's a good person. But I'm not. Not really. You see, even she could see the practicality of _stopping_ you before you could hurt us, but _I_ wanted hurt you just because I generally want to hurt the people who try to drown and or strangle me and mine. Because I hate you and I can’t _stop_ hating you, and I don’t even want to try. My plan was to beat your head in with a rock, by the way."  
  
Kyle gives the barest of nods. She can't tell if he's acknowledging what she said or approving of her plan. Who even knows with an O'Shae.  
  
"Now this part is important. You _remember_ this, okay?" She lets her weight sink down so that her elbow presses a sharp, steady pressure down on his windpipe. His face gets redder and redder, the pressure fattening his carotid artery against the knife tip like a rain-swollen worm, like it's just _aching_ for the red-sweet release of a puncture.  
  
"You are only alive right now because Wanderer wanted you be. And every day after this, when you wrap your arms around Sunny and play soccer with your brother and smile at the everyone like you deserve to be here, you _remember_ ," She leans down so her mouth drags against the shell of his ear, her long, long hair blocking his Ian-blue eyes from view, "That you are only alive because I allow it."  
  
Kyle acts exactly the same the next day, and the day after, and the day after that, never does anything to suggest she was a soul-tendril's breadth away from letting him bleed out on a borrowed mattress for Sunny or Ian to find. Still, it's kind of nice to know that's she's the voice in the back of someone's head again.  
  
  
  
  
  
2.  
  
When Wanderer wakes up, it honestly doesn’t occur to Mel that they’re all going to stay. She just expects them to understand that she has territorial rights and that they’ll get their turn later, but none of them move an inch, and she hates them all a little bit because she can’t tell Wanderer everything she needs to because she is alone in her own mind and she aches with it, with all this space.  
  
And since she _can't_ actually kick them all out of the hospital, they all just lurk around her cot looking possessive and trying to sneak closer and closer to her until Ian has two fingers looped around her pinkie, Mel is playing with a strand of her hair, and Jamie is just touching her foot like a talisman. It's not until Wanderer is drifting off again and Jamie's half-crawled onto the cot with her that Doc finally banishes them, informing them in a very soft voice that still somehow sounds like yelling that he has no idea what he's supposed to be watching out for with this sort of thing, but that he is _definitely_ not going to notice it if it happens with all of them crammed in here like they're playing sardines.  
  
  
  
  
Three nights later, Doc declares her “not immediately dying, at any rate” and releases her into Mel’s custody, because _he_ at least has eyes in his head and a healthy respect for his own well-being.  
  
  
  
  
  
"You're sleeping with Jared and Jamie tonight."  
  
"Do I get a say in this at all?"  
  
"No. Now go away."  
  
Ian sighs heavily, then shambles up to his feet and pops something in his neck loudly enough that Wanderer giggles. Then she frowns inwardly, like she's accusing her body of something. Ian squeezes her hand and smiles at her, eyes soft and blue as denim.  
  
"Goodnight," he says softly and kisses her very chastely on the cheek. Wanderer whispers goodnight back, blushing crimson and visibly stifling another giggle. Jared follows him out, eyes lingering first on Wanderer, then on her. His eyes crinkle up in a private smile, although she’s not entirely certain which one of them it’s meant for. He pushed the door shut behind him.  
  
"This host does… _that_ a lot, I've noticed. I can't help it - it's like having the hiccups all the time," she muses as Mel flops down on the mattress, scooting to one side to make room for Wanderer and tearing open a bag of Cheetos with something like reverence. Wanderer is looking at them with the oddest look on her face, and Mel has to search for Wanderer's old expressions in these new features.  
  
"You're nervous - why are you nervous?"  
  
"What if - " She swallows dryly and licks her lips (smaller and fuller than these, a mouth made for pouting and smiles, not their old wry grins), not looking at her. "What if what I lo - " She starts over. "What if the things I liked when we - when I was in your body, I only loved _because_ I was in your body?"  
  
"One way to find out."  
  
Mel holds a Cheeto out, orange cheese dust caking her fingertips and does a sort of 'here comes the airplane' routine until Wanderer finally laughs, soft and nervous, and bites down with a crunch that echoing all around the room and then they're both laughing, knee-jerk, remembering Jared trying to Guantanamo them into submission that first week. The other girl’s eyes roll back in her head and she _groans_ around the artificial cheese product she's still chomping on, just _savoring_ it and then making this really weird squealing sound when she's done that she doesn't even bother to be irritated with her body for, she's so excited, eyes huge and flashing silver in the starlight.  
  
"So you still like the things you like - which is lucky since you're… _eighteen_ , right?"  
  
She goes completely still and then makes a really terrible attempt at looking innocent and fails miserably even with her new angelic face and then they're both in hysterics, giggling like crazy people - which isn't even something Mel _does_ , has _ever_ done ever since she discovered sarcasm a year earlier than all her friends and started forsaking slumber parties and girls her own age for soccer practice and track and cultivating good grades and a bad attitude. Even counting those seventeen years before the alien apocalypse, Wanderer is probably the best friend she's ever had.  
  
They’re still for a long time after that, fingers laced tight together, knees stacked, and Mel is so happy and so miserable she can’t breathe right.  
  
  
  
  
"Is this weird for you, too?"  
  
"The w-"  
  
"Don't say the weirdest."  
  
"Why not?"  
  
"Because I knew that's what you were going to say. Because I should be hearing you in my head. But I'm not. And that makes me sad."  
  
"Isn't that a good thing?"  
  
"It used to be. Now it's not.”  
  
“ _Why_ isn’t it a good thing?” Her voice is soft and hoarse.  
  
"It's too quiet. In my own head. That shouldn't be weird, but it is. And I kind of hate." A beat. "I miss you."  
  
"I'm right here."  
  
"No. You're way over there." And she reaches out and tucks a strand of crazy blonde hair behind one ear, their fingers still intertwined so both their knuckles rest against Wanderer’s new cheek.  
  
"I'm right here," she repeats, almost to herself.  
  
"But I'll never have you that close again."  
  
Wanderer says nothing, just stares at her with silver eyes, re-memorizing what used to be her face.  
  
  
  
  
  
3.  
  
Jared knows he's not allowed to miss Wanda. He gave up that chance a long time ago and he'll live with it now, even if he didn't know what it was he was doing at the time. But sometimes he looks at Mel's face and expects to see someone else, her eyes wide and always just a little bit afraid. Usually of him. The memory twists in his guts like Mel’s seventeen year old face, determined and embarrassment, the most perfect thing in the world.  
  
  
  
  
He remembers that first night with Mel and Jamie, how the light had been bright orange, the sun a searing burnished copper sinking into the Canyon, her hands on him, her questioning eyes.  
  
It seems stupid now, that he made her wait. The first and probably last girl he’d ever found at the end of the world, and he told her no because she was a kid (which is bullshit, Mel hadn’t been a kid for years, for _centuries_ ).  
  
It was just that the rules that made the world a society hadn't mattered in so long, and here were these others, in a place he thought he'd be alone in forever. And he wanted to be a person for them, not just this two-legged animal that happened to wear clothes. So he told her no. Because there was a world somewhere where he’s getting an Economics degree, where he has an internship and parents he wants to introduce her to someday, a parallel universe where he tells his dad he wants to do it right with this girl, quiet and almost offhand over a beer while he watches Mel talk to his mom from the porch, where his parents stay together and he never carves a scar onto the back of his neck with a hunting knife.  Somewhere, somehow it still mattered that it would be sort of illegal to give Mel everything she wanted.  
  
 _Idiot_ , he wants to tell that Jared from four years ago. _You_ idiot, _you hold onto that girl and you don’t ever let her go, not for a second. If she wants to leave, you go with her. If she wants_ you _, you give her every last cell. Being together is more important than being a good man, you stupid, stupid boy._  
  
He never listens. He always sleeps on the couch. He never follows her to Chicago.  
  
He loses her all over again every night.  
  
  
  
  
He knows Mel loves him, trusts him more than anyone except Jamie (or Wanda), but he knows she can't forget his fist connecting with the soft crescent of Wanda's cheekbone, the unrepentant cruelly of his indifference, of his denial. She can forgive it, maybe, but she can't forget, the knowledge that Wanda was not safe with him. When she's holding the cryotank, she angles her body away from his just slightly. It's protective.  
  
And it almost feels good, it _does_ , because he deserves it. Every time they don’t trust him with her, it’s like pressing a bruise, aching and well-earned.  
  
So when Mel and Jeb come to him about finding a new host body, what else is he possibly supposed to do? What else can he say but yes, yes forever, yes until he can make it right? Somewhere there’s a world where he doesn’t ruin Wanda, doesn’t damage something tender and brittle within her beyond all recognition, and that’s the world he sees in the new host, this body he's never hurt or betrayed.  
  
  
  
  
They all handle her with kid gloves, speaking softer and moving slower, giving her all the time in the world. And maybe because he’s required to keep a certain distance from her, he’s able to see what they’re doing.  
  
They’re leaving her alone all over again.  
  
He sees it, see the same longing in her new face that she had when she looked at them before - Ian, Jamie, _him_ \- all these things she wanted and wasn't allowed to have. They’re trying to make the transition as painless and gentle as they can for her, but they can’t see that she’d rather be roughly handled and jarred and terrified than be _apart_ from them again. And he understands, he does, and there’s absolutely nothing he can do about it, is permitted to do by these unspoken rules they’ve all agreed on. He's just barely remembering that he used to be a person who knew how to be kind.  
  
And he just - wants to. To be kind - to her, to _anyone_. Doesn't know how, with the life and the resources available to him, but he wants to. He can carry as many boxes and pull out as many chairs and save as many bags of Cheetos from the supplies as he wants, but it won't make up for the fingers on the small of her back, the brushes against her ankle under the table that he can't give her.  
  
  
  
  
  
He finds her in the fields, in between the rows of corn. It’s an accident, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been looking for her all day. She’s so small now, she can fit unnoticed in places their minds all collectively skip over, thinking in terms of Melanie’s proportions. She’s carefully pulling up tiny weeds, the red-brown soil stark against her pale skin. She jumps a little when he materializes between the looming stalks, then giggles, then looks annoyed that she’s giggled. Her features are almost cartoonishly exaggerated - her eyes and lips and cheeks rounded and full - and emotions flickers across them like signal flares. He wonders a little absently if she misses being able to hide behind Mel’s impassive face.  
  
“Hello,” she greets, a trace of laughter still caught in her throat, at odds with the cautious look in her eyes.  
  
“Hey.” He crouches down next to her, knees creaking, pokes his finger in the dirt. _Dry_ , he thinks, _Too dry. Someone missed their shift this morning._  
  
There’s a long beat of stillness between them where he looks at her and she looks at the ground. Then finally, she stretches to reach a loop of vine that’s trying to choke one of the smaller corn stalks, and he starts tugging a deep-rooted stub of something prickly, and they’re both quiet and useful together for a while, and it’s nice.  
  
His hamstrings start to cramp after five minutes, so he’s on his hands and knees, grinding dirt into jeans by the time they finish the row and start on the next one. Sweat stings at eyes and every time he rubs at them with one wrist he just makes mud that dries on his face a minute later. He’s sticky and grubby and itching all over when his hands reach for the same clump of green that hers do. They’ve worked their way back to the middle of the row, Wanda glistening and flushed where he is stiff and caked all over with red dirt. He leaves his hand on hers. Her skin is hot against his.  
  
It's just that he remembers what it's like not to be touched for years at a time, or for hours that felt like years, and this is all he knows how to give her to make it easier.  
  
He touches her shoulder, so lightly, and thinks as loud as he can, _Let me be kind to you._  
  
Her smile is not wistful, but more…apologetic. Nostalgic, maybe. She knows she used to want this and it's the old her that could still want Jared that she would like to get back most, not Jared himself. It was only when she was sharing with Melanie that she needed him in that wet-eyed, stomach-clenched way. It's Melanie she's missing when she misses him, and he gets that, mostly. It makes him think about when he'd overheard his aunt talking to his mom at the kitchen table about her postpartum - shamed and so confused that she could miss her son so intensely when he was right there playing at her feet. This, at least, he understands, this he remembers. The constant, bone-deep ache of being at once within touching distance and a thousand miles away from the one person you want most.  
  
He lets go because she wants him to, and leaves because he doesn’t know if she wants him to stay or not. The rains start that night, Wanda drifting into Ian’s hands and arms and sweet, greedy touches like a tide. That’s how it should be.  
  
That’s how it should be _now_ , anyway.  
  
  
  
  
People get more beautiful the to you the longer you know them. He read this in a copy of _Glamour_ that was the only reading material for three months at his summer job as a desk manager at a pool supply store one year, that the chemicals that make you feel love towards someone eventually make you sort of see them in soft-focus, more attractive and charming and nice-smelling that they probably really are. Her old body was pre-tuned to his frequency - wanting him was just muscle memory she couldn't always control. She saw him through Mel’s eyes, Mel’s memory, Mel’s lean brushstroke of a body that would always see him as a better man than he really was. But this new body's imprinted on Ian like baby bird, saw his face before she saw her own, even, much less Jared's, and now he won't ever get the chance to tell her again, because Melanie would understand but Ian would not, and they both know this. And - and she just doesn't need him for anything anymore.  
  
It stings more than he thought it would.  
  
  
  
  
But he's seen the way Mel looks at Ian - confused and almost accusing - and he thinks that if anyone should gives him a pass for wanting two people and yet only one all at the same time, it's her. But being survivors of the end of the world means they’re used to not mentioning the things that they do without, and he puts Wanda’s name up on a shelf with his parents and his aunt and all the people he’ll never get back.  
  
  
  
  
Sometimes, in the dark, he presses his face into the hollow of Mel’s shoulder, and maybe they allow each other, just for a moment, to pretend, and to be kind.  
  
  
  
  
  
4.  
  
He knows it’s probably not like coma patients, where sometimes they can hear everything that was said to them when they were unconscious, but the love of his life is a tiny silver starburst in cyrogenic stasis in an alien thermos. He’s accepted that he’s kind of out of his depth here. Who even knows what Wanda can hear.  
  
So on the off-chance that she _can_ hear him, and because what else is going to do with his free time, he carries Wanda’s cryotank around, first reverently in both hands, then as he gets used to its size and weight, tucked safe under one arm, snug to his ribs.  
  
It’s boring stuff, but the boring stuff is what she likes. _It’s gross and hot out today_ , he hums to her metallic shell, Snow White in her glass coffin, _The green beans are looking pretty scrawny, we are all for sure going to starve. Jamie’s growth will be stunted and he’ll never get a girlfriend. The cantaloupes are looking good, though. He’ll be a runt, but at least he won’t get scurvy._  
  
 _I miss you_ , he whispers to her at night, his arms clutching her tight to his chest, _I love you so much. Please don’t fall asleep in there, I have so much to tell you still._  
  
It goes on like this. He has no idea what Mel does when she has her, but he tries to give her everything she’s missing that he can. _Fresh bread today, Wanda. Mel’s hair is getting really long. Kind of cloudy. I miss you. I pulled something weird in my back when I was weeding today, it hurts like a_ bitch. _I got my first kiss when I was twelve, her name was Stacy Duff and she had red hair and braces. I miss you. I don’t actually like the Beatles that much. Jamie is growing like a_ weed _, he is going to be a million feet tall. Onion soup again today. Jeb is completely crazy, just in case you never picked up on that. The potatoes are nearly grown, Jamie wants to make french fries. The sunset today was bright pink. I miss you._  
  
He and Melanie both get possessive and weird about her, handing over the cryotank to each other every few nights only with great bitterness and much dragging of heels. He has to leave her with Melanie for _two weeks_ when he has to go on a short raid with Jared, and the second he’s back in the caves, she’s there, holding out the cool cylinder and looking deeply resentful. He sings to her all night, remembering her stories about the Singing World, eyeless and sleepy a million miles under the sea and never, ever alone.  
  
“ _Seems like all I was really doin’, was waiting for you_ ,” he croons, low and out of key. “I mean, I think they’re overrated, but I like that one. Let’s dance to it at our wedding, okay? I am going to take your silence for approval...I am going to take your continued silence as acceptance of my proposal. I will expect you to refer to me as your fiance now. I miss you.”  
  
If she doesn’t remember any of this, he won’t stop until he’s told her all over again, every day, every boring little detail, every dumb story, every song.  
  
He hopes she’ll know that what he means is, _This is how much I missed you. This is how long I waited._  
  
  
  
  
The new body has blonde hair, he notes absently, pale enough that it catches and refracts some tiny remnants of Wanda's glow, and it squeezes his chest for some reason. He's sad, he realizes, not because he's afraid for her (he trusts her, always, to find him), but because he's never going to get this back. The Wanderer who fits in his hands, who requires his protection and care every moment of the day, who he can curl his body around at night, will be swallowed up by this new Wanderer who has hands to touch him and feet to take her wherever she wants, even if it's away from him.  
  
Her body - her _real_ body, miraculous and so vulnerable - is small enough to fit in the palm of his hand, slick and yet somehow…indistinct. The gossamer threads whisping out from her body are so delicate that they seem to fade into nothing, like they're just the vague idea of limbs instead of the real thing.  
  
 _I am never going to see this again_ , he thinks suddenly, with something that's in-between panic and a longing so intense it takes his breath away, and his fingers tighten around Wanda instinctively and he has to force them to loosen, to remember that he has no idea how fragile or sensitive she is, to remember that he doesn't want to _make_ her stay with him. To remember that everything in his body trusts her to choose him the way he's chosen her - every time, always. And he hopes, for both of them, that she knows - in whatever way her tiny body thinks and feels - that it's _his_ hands that are around her, holding her safe.  
  
"Ian," Doc says meaningfully, trying and failing to be patient as the host body's blood seeps between his fingers from the incision.  
  
"I'll see you soon, beautiful," he whispers to her, and lets her slide, easy as anything, into a new face for him to love, if she'll let him.  
  
  
  
  
His long arms wrap around her, his body shaping a protective question mark around hers, and it's funny because this seems so much bigger than it was before even though there is so much less of her to hold (Melanie straddles the line between "average" and "tallish" - with her back turned Wanda looks to be somewhere between "petite" and "recently kidnapped from a local playground"). He laughs low in his throat.  
  
"What?" she says, twisting in his grasp a little to look at him, and he's pleased for no real reason that he can hear the smile in her voice - softer than Mel's, but a little huskier.  
  
"Nothing, just - the more things change, you know?" She _hmm_ s sleepily and he smiles into her neck.  
  
He hums absently for a while, running his knuckles along her arm in time to the chorus.  
  
“What’s that song from?” She asks suddenly, craning her neck to glance at him. “I like it.”  
  
Her hair is silver in the moonlight.  
  
  
  
  
5.  
  
 _"He should be with kids his own age. He should be able to get into fights and have secrets and look like an idiot for girl."_  
  
He hears Mel and Jared talking through the raggedy print screen because no one in the cave apparently gets that sound bounces around in here like an iPod in a bowl (which isn’t a trick that actually matters anymore, but it was a really cool discovery when he didn’t want to spend all his allowance on speakers, one of those fun, Bill Nye “Science can be cool!” moments). He leans against the cave wall, keeping his footsteps quiet, resting his weight on the balls of his feet. Jared says something he can’t quite make out, voice low and relaxed. He’s not placating - because you don’t _placate_ Mel - but it’s that _what’re ya gonna do?_ voice that always makes whatever’s wrong seems like less of a big deal.  
  
Mel’s not having it, though, and she talks for a while about how he’s going to end up emotionally stunted or a serial killer or something because she’s screwed up his childhood by only managing to find weird, crazy hill-people for him to hang out with. Jamie pads away in the same pair of red Converse he’s been wearing for two years now. His toes are pressing right up against the sides of them now, his growth spurt burning through clothes and shoes faster than they can steal them. He hates that something as dumb as getting taller is making Mel feel like she’s doing an even worse job than she usually does, but he’s seriously going to have to ask to start borrowing some of Ian’s old shoes, or his stupid hobbit feet are going to get rubbed down to stumps.  
  
He wanders around to the big caves and sits down in between the rows of curling cantaloupe vines, the melons fat and swollen and almost ready for picking. He kicks off his too-small shoes and digs his toes into the dry dirt, dusty and rust-red this late in the day.  
  
He knows, intellectually, that Mel’s right, that this is the age when he's supposed to be obsessed with girls and sex and all that stuff, and it's not that he's not _interested_ in it, it's just that, well, who exactly is he supposed to be obsessed _with_? Melanie and Wanda are actually closer to his age than the other kids in the caves, and Melanie is his sister and Wanda's his best friend and _basically_ his sister and has a boyfriend. (She calls Ian her "partner," which he thought was what two boyfriends or two girlfriends called each other because they couldn't get married and because he bet it would get confusing after awhile, but Wanda says it's what souls call their boyfriends or girlfriends because they don't get married at _all_. He can't decide if he thinks that's really smart or kind of sad. Wanda says that maybe it's both. Wanda is really smart, but also kind of sad, so he believes her.) So he can't really think of them that way at all, because it's gross. And illegal. And gross.  
  
He doesn't feel _deprived_ of anything exactly, it's not like he has anything to compare it to or to miss. As far as he can tell, having a girlfriend ( _"a partner,"_ he thinks, liking the sound of it) is someone who - besides all the kissing stuff - always listens to you and keeps all your secrets and holds your hand and misses you when you go away and loves you more than anything. Jamie already has people who do all these things for him, who love him and take care of him and trust him and scoop him up in bone-crushing hugs for no reason at all. Except he can't help but notice that everyone _has_ sort of been pairing off lately. Which is good, he wants them to be happy and to have each other and to have partners and smile all the time. But he does kinda for uneven numbers. So he doesn't really feel excluded or like he's being denied or anything, but he does feel very…young, when he thinks about it. Which isn't something he's ever felt in a long, long time. He can't tell if it's a good feeling or an annoying one yet.  
  
Jamie had to grown up very fast, he'd old enough that he can recognize this, old enough to know that it's sad and unfair and permanent. He doesn't know how to go back to the person he was before the souls came, who felt sick and tingly when he thought about blood and broken bones, who when he saw dead animals on the side of the road would cry a little sometimes, later, when he got back home. Before-Jamie desperately wanted his sister's attention, and when she wouldn't give it to him would talk back and flick things at her and read texts from her phone out loud at dinner. He's ashamed of before-Jamie, but sometimes he still misses him. He used to miss before-Jared, too, the Jared who lived with them in the cabin in the Grand Canyon and had a smile as big and wide as the sky, but now that Mel's back, so is before-Jared. He sometimes gets intensely jealous that Jared can just _do_ that, that he gets to live like the person he used to be, but with all the things he's learned since. If Jamie could go back in time with all the things he knows, he'd never be sad again. He'd be so nice to his sister and make her pancakes with blueberries every day and be patient and kind and funny and he would never, ever let her leave him, no matter how hard she tried, or what reasons she had. He'd tell his mom he loved her every day when she dropped him off for school, in front of everyone, and not care. He'd wear her lipstick print on his cheek like a merit badge and he would not get mad at her for offering to help with his homework, or ever.  
  
But he can't do any of these things, so he tries to be happy for Jared, that he can. But it's hard.  
  
Jared can do lots of semi-miraculous stuff like this. Jared can start fires and find food and chop wood, can do magic tricks and tell stories so good and so scary they'd keep him wide awake in the pitch-black of the cabin for _days_ , but Jared can't do what Jamie can. Jamie can do _anything_ without complaining. He can remember his dreams better than anyone he's ever met. He can get angry and not yell and take it out at anyone else, just keep it quiet and hard inside of him until it eases away on it's own. He can make people talk to him even when they try to ignore him and just stay miserable and selfish forever, which isn't something _just_ Jared does but is something that Jared does all the same. Jared's a man, but he doesn't think Jared's much of a grown-up. Grown-ups stay.  
  
Grown-ups are also trusted to _be_ grown-ups, which Jamie isn't, or at least not always. He's on his own a lot, which isn't really the same thing as being trusted. Everyone just knows he's not stupid, because he _isn't_ and because he managed to live this long somehow without parents and then without Melanie. So he's allowed to go wherever he wants in the caves and help with work and give the plants enough water to feed them but not to drown. But Wanda _trusts_ him, was the first person to ever trust him with _everything_ , trusted him to keep her safe and to tell her the truth and to believe her back when she told him her secrets and all of her stories, and he knew right away that he needed to never, ever do anything to make her not trust him anymore. He thinks that's the first time he started being a man a little bit.  
  
  
  
  
He is twelve or maybe thirteen when Mel leaves to find Sharon, and it’s like she takes all the air out of his lungs with her and even though Jared is _right there_ he feels so alone it’s like the invasion all over again and all of a sudden he misses everyone, fresh and stinging. He doesn’t talk for two days, just wraps his arms tight around himself and watches the colors spread and recede across the canyon. On the third day, Jared sits down next to him by the fire pit, long legs pulled up so he’s all weird, spidery angles in the sunset light.  
  
“You know how I told you how my parents split up when I was about your age?” he asks, not looking at Jared, just watching the way the shadows turn the clouds purple.  
  
“Yeah.” He feels scraped-out and hollow and he doesn’t want to talk, not even to Jared.  
  
"Well, I took it really hard. Because I had no idea it was going to happen and then everything was just different, and ruined. So I had to see this counselor at school. And he told me that I should take the things that were making me sad - not just upset, but like, _really_ making me sad - and to just put them up on a shelf way out of the way where I didn't have to deal with them until I was ready. And he told me to imagine a shelf like that, where I could put all the bad things, and imagine a big box to hold them all and to seal it up and stick it right up at the top where I wouldn’t have to look at it.”  
  
“Did it work?”  
  
Jared smiles, the crow’s feet around his eyes deep and nice-looking.  
  
“Not really. But maybe it’ll work better for you. You have a way better imagination than I ever did.” And then he reaches out and messes up Jamie’s hair and Jamie tackles him and they run around chasing each other for an hour and then they have a bag of Chips Ahoy for dinner and spit-swear not to tell Mel. This is when they think Mel is coming back, when Jared is still before-Jared.  
  
  
  
  
It’s four weeks before they realized something went wrong, and Jared’s smile and his laugh and his stories go away for good. It’s another six months and he’s grown an inch before he actually tries to put things in boxes, but it’s been so long since he’s seen a for-real set of shelves that it doesn’t work. So he does what Mel would do and uses his surroundings to his best advantage.  
  
At first he thinks that the cave where they take baths is the best place, because it's so dark in there that you can't see anything, not even bad things. But then he thinks that when he goes there for a bath for real, he's going to think of all the sad things he put in there and he'll have to start taking baths in the gross spring by the corn field that smells like eggs. So he puts all his bad, sad things in the storage hole way at the end of the cave, near the entrance, because he never goes there, so he never has to think about them. He puts in his mom and his dad and peanut butter-honey sandwiches and soccer and his friends, Tony, Yusif, and Trudy.  And he puts Melanie in last because he's allowed to be sad about Melanie, even if he _can't_ be right now.  
  
And then one day Melanie is there anyway, but it's weird because even though all the bad things get shaken loose when she and Wanda move out of the storage hole, some of the good things he didn't know he put in there come out, too. So when he gets Wanda, he doesn't get Melanie back right away, but he gets soccer again, and bread hot from the oven, and the stars through the holes in the roof, and cold spring water on his face when it's really, really hot out, and his dad's voice singing all the words to every Disney song, and maybe that's being a man, too. Finding good things where you thought there was only a cave full of sadness and saying, "yes, I want you" to _all_ of them, because you know that they all have to come together or not at all, and you'd rather have good _and_ bad than be empty. He wishes that he had his dad to ask if this is true, and that's one of the bad things because he won't ever get his dad back like he got Melanie, but it's maybe a good thing, too.  Because he thought that he had started to forget his dad because he couldn't look at his sad things, but missing his him makes him miss his beard and his one crooked canine tooth and the way he could flip pancake so high in the air they sometimes hit the ceiling and made mom mad. He thought that he'd lost all those things, but Wanda brings them back, and he understands, suddenly, that sometimes bad things can be good things, too. Since he first met Wanda, he's always happy and sad at the same time, and he's still trying to figure out how that can be and what it _means_ that he _can_ be.  
  
He thinks that maybe that's not just being a grown-up, _or_ being a man. He thinks that's just being Jamie. And that's a good thing.


End file.
